It is a statistic likely to raise eyebrows in more than a few households, but an international study has crowned British women among the “queens of leisure” of the Western world.

A new comparison published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found that women in the UK have – or at least admit to having – more leisure time than their counterparts in any other EU country and second only to those in Norway among the world’s leading economies.

It claims that British women clock up an average of 339 minutes a day relaxing – almost 70 per cent more than those in Portugal enjoy and 61 per cent more leisure than Chinese women have.

The figure is also well ahead of that for French, Italian, Polish and Spanish women among European comparisons.

But women in Norway – one of the richest countries in the world – manage more than six hours of leisure a day, the OECD found.

The comparison, published ahead of International Women’s Day, suggests that British women spend 126 minutes a day watching television and 87 minutes seeing friends.

By contrast they only run up 258 minutes of “unpaid work” including 133 minutes of housework and another 40 minutes doing the family shop.

The estimates were greeted with scepticism in some quarters.

“Who are these women?” said Siobhan Freegard, co-founder of the website Netmums.

“Unless they are ‘trust fund chicks’ I cannot imagine who these women are.”

It also found that British men not only have some of the highest amounts of daily leisure in the OECD study but, significantly, have 43 minutes more free time than women in the UK.

In a possible blow to national pride, it also found that no matter how they might think of themselves as “new men”, British males have been overtaken by their counterparts in France in terms of pulling their weight around the house.

Men in Britain manage an average of 141 minutes a day of unpaid work, ranging from household chores and shopping to childcare or the school run.

That figure is down from the 150 minutes they mustered when the survey was last carried out in 2001.

By contrast French men have upped their game on the domestic front, increasing from 136 minutes to143, two minutes more than their British counterparts.

But in the land of the 35-hour working week, French men also manage to fit in half an hour more sleep time per day than Britons.

French women also do 25 minutes less domestic work than British women - and spend 25 per cent more time on their "personal care".

Scandinavians are the most domesticated men in the world with Danish and Norwegian males each averaging more than three hours a day of effort on the domestic front.

By contrast Korean men put in the shortest time at home with only three quarters of an hour unpaid work, just behind their counterparts in Japan and India. But they also have some of the longest working hours in the world.

Ms Freegard said: “Our mums will have a good laugh at being the leisure queens of Europe.

“When we have researched this topic, many tell us that they have 15 minutes a day to themselves of what we call ‘real leisure’ – not multitasking, not listening to the radio while cooking dinner but actually a chance to sit in peace with a magazine or a book or just to look at the trees.